Experts term hardliner’s recommendation “saber rattling
CAIRO: An Israeli minister has reiterated calls for his country’s military to invade and occupy the Gaza Strip, including the border region with Egypt.
Avigdor Lieberman, the minister for strategic threats, said Israel’s security depends in part on “taking back control of the Gaza-Egypt border to stop weapons smuggling.
Lieberman, considered a hardliner among Israeli politicians, said Egypt had not been doing enough to prevent arms smuggling to Palestinian factions, reportedly through a series of tunnels.
The Israeli minister’s remarks seemed to contradict earlier assurances from other members of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s cabinet.
At a session of the Israeli Political-Security cabinet in late October, Israeli officials pledged to increase cooperation with Egypt in order to reduce the smuggling of war materiel.
The cabinet also pledged to step up their efforts against Hamas in order to foil their efforts to strengthen themselves, prevent terrorist acts from the Gaza Strip, and halt the firing of missiles and mortars into Israeli territory, a statement issued by Israel s Foreign Ministry and given to The Daily Star Egypt earlier this month said.
But an expert on military studies dismissed Israeli talk of retaking the border strip as mere saber rattling.
Israel is releasing continued statements on the border issue, but I reiterate that Israel will not take any military action without consulting Egypt first, Dr Mohammed Kadry Saeed, an expert on military studies at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies told The Daily Star Egypt.
Amira Oron, a spokeswoman with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, told The Daily Star Egypt earlier that the Israeli government wasn t going to alter any existing agreements with Egypt, but she said Israel would like to see better results in terms of Egypt s role in stopping the smuggling of illicit weapons into the Gaza Strip.
“Nothing is going to be too dramatic – we re going to do military operations in Gaza to make it more difficult to smuggle weapons, said Oron.
Oron said Israeli intelligence probes have discovered that heavier and increasingly dangerous weaponry has been entering Gaza, including anti-aircraft armaments that could change the equilibrium in the region.
The situation is getting worse, she told The Daily Star Egypt.
But Egyptian officials insist they have stepped up raids on smuggling operations along the Philadelphi corridor, an 11 km stretch that is only 100 m wide.
Last week, Egyptian security forces said they had seized a quantity of explosives from a man planning to smuggle them into the Gaza Strip through a tunnel dug under the border.
The explosives were found in a car in the Egyptian part of the town of Rafah, straddling the Egypt-Gaza border, a security source said, without specifying the size of the find.
In the past month, Egyptian security forces have arrested at least seven alleged weapons smugglers.
